Yes, indeed, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for V.P., is certainly babealicious! (One thing we know about McCain is that he has a keen eye for the ladies, as his first wife, who was an invalid when he cheated on her post-Vietnam, discovered long ago.) But what about slightly more pressing qualifications for Vice President, like intelligence, talent and knowledge of the world? We think McCain missed his big opportunity here. We believe that Big John chose the wrong Palin. He should have picked Michael Palin!

Michael Palin, Comedian, TV Writer, Filmmaker, World Traveler

Everybody, of course, remembers Michael Edward Palin, CBE, as perhaps the funniest member of that wonderful group of zanies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But he is much more than that! As the creator of an acclaimed series of travel documentaries, Oxford graduate Palin is truly a man of the world. Whereas Sarah Palin, like our current Fearless Leader, probably couldn’t find the Himalayas on a globe, this man has actually been there and made a mini-series about his experiences. Thus, he would have been uniquely qualified to bring both wit and gravitas to the GOP ticket – qualities that the Republicans need desperately. There’s also the sex-appeal factor: once voted the best-looking Python, Palin has had rapturous female fans literally faint in his arms. So Michael’s allure for female voters would have been at least as strong as working mother Sarah Palin’s could ever hope to be. Of course, there’s the awkward fact that Michael would have been constitutionally ineligible for the job, having gotten himself born in England, in some godforsaken place called Ranmoor in Yorkshire (wherever that is). But since when has either establishment party let a technicality like the Constitution get in its way? After all, not a single American war since 1945, including our current misadventure in Iraq, has been legally sanctioned by a formal Congressional Declaration of War, as Article One of the US Constitution requires. Compared to that violation, choosing a non-American as Vice President would be, as the Brits themselves say, “small beer.”

Also, in choosing the young, unfledged Governor of Alaska as his running mate, John McCain has proven yet again that he’s just another lying bastard politician. After swearing up and down that he would choose the smartest and best-experienced person for the job, to whom does he turn? A first-term Governor of a state incredibly remote from the centers of power. A woman whose most impressive pre-Gubernatorial experience (moose-hunting aside) is having served as mayor of a town so tiny it makes Cicely — the fictional small town of the TV series Northern Exposure — look like Chicago by comparison. A politician who actually asked, in a TV interview, “…what is it exactly that the VP does every day?” and then had to hear her interviewer patiently explain, “It’s a pretty big job, Madame Governor… You’d be surprised by how big the veep job is these days!” Since McCain, if elected, would be three years older than even Ronald Reagan was when he was elected, one would think that the problem of selecting the best person to stand “a heartbeat away” from the most powerful office in the world would be somewhat more pressing for him than the average candidate. But today no consideration – none – trumps the Machiavellian demands of power politics.

The big lesson of this electoral season, in fact, is that you can’t believe a word that comes out of any establishment candidate’s mouth. Consider the following:

Obama, after countering accusations of lack of experience with the unarguable claim that good judgment, such as voting against the Iraq War, trumps mere experience ever time, selects as his running mate the old war hawk (and hack) Smilin’ Joe Biden, who not only voted for the war, but served as chairman of a committee, in the run-up to the war, that held a “sham hearing,” refusing to call for testimony from dissenting voices like that of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and all but rubber-stamping Bush’s mad decision. (This crime is compounded by the fact that, as mentioned above, going to war was not even Bush’s decision to make, but Congress’.)

Hillary Rotten Clinton, after her unprecedented betrayal of her party in the primaries – when she bluntly declared that her “friend,” the Republican’s presumptive nominee, was more qualified to be president than her primary opponent – has now totally reversed herself, claiming that not only is Obama fully qualified to be president, but that McCain (who is still her “friend”) has become the “twin” of the utterly incompetent George W. Bush.

McCain and the Republicans, after fifteen years of vilifying Hillary Clinton as the devil’s spawn, for all the wrong reasons, now shed crocodile tears of sympathy over her supposedly heartless treatment at the hands of the Democrats. (The last time I checked she was beaten fair and square, probably because of her support for the war, though I guess we’re not supposed to mention that.) They are so sad about this, in fact, that they want to make it up to the women of America by nominating their own “strong feminist candidate” as V.P. – a smiling cipher whose political judgment is even more dubious than Clinton’s. The craven, lying mainstream media is already calling Governor Palin a “maverick,” though she’s more of a standard-issue Repug than even her running mate: both “pro-life” and pro-death penalty – what the Lord giveth, the State taketh away – and, of course, pro-Iraq War and anti-Iran, she even supports drilling in ANWR.

But who is the worst, most pathetic liar of all, worse than Clinton, Obama or even McCain? The American Voter, who constantly lies to himself/herself, in the crazy belief that all these professional liars will suddenly start telling the truth once they get into office.

Meanwhile, there is a presidential candidate who has consistently told the truth: Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party. She was right about the Iraq War. She was right in her suspicions that Bush was warned about 9/11. She is right about universal healthcare. She is right about the government’s shameful treatment of Katrina victims. The definition of insanity is to make the same choice over and over again and expect a different result. This year, choose sanity. Vote Green!

[…] frauds of Wall Street. Actually the Times piece reads more like a Monty Python skit (see my post on Michael Palin, below), so full of demented dialogue and comic bits of business was the account (given by an […]